Today we dive into the short fiction of George Saunders through his collection Tenth of December.
Saunders made it in the literary world on short fiction alone. He might be the only person I know of to do this. His first novel came out earlier this year and that was twenty-one years after his first story collection (and novella).
I can’t believe I’ve made it nine months through these articles on short fiction without getting to him. There’s so much to learn.
George Saunders
I once watched an interview with Saunders, and he said that some of his stories start out as 200+ page novels. Then he realizes how unnecessary most of that is.
It sometimes takes years or even a decade, but eventually, it gets distilled down to the important bits, only a few pages long.
Most writers don’t trust their readers enough to do this. Most writers don’t want to do the work it takes to produce short fiction with this type of professional mindset.
I haven’t finished the whole collection Tenth of December yet, but I wanted to do a post on the title story. I don’t know how much longer this story started, but holy is it dense.
I had to go back and read the first three paragraphs again after I finished the story for them to make sense.
Tenth of December
We’re dropped into a character’s head with pretty much no context as to what’s going on. The descriptions are scatterbrained and keep referencing people and things that make sense to the character but not the reader. Some of the words and people are made up.
This is a character with a fully developed voice and backstory and eventually, it starts to make sense, but this is exactly how you’d expect it to be inside someone’s head the first time. If it makes sense right off, you’re doing it wrong.
Anyway, it doesn’t take as much time to get your bearings as I made it sound, but everything mentioned does play a role.
So, we figure out that we’re in the head of a child who has gone out to play. He’s making up stories, but he’s pretending they’re real. So to the reader, it’s a little disorienting as to what’s real and what’s made up.
We also realize the short, choppy, scattered sentences with bad grammar and made-up slang makes sense for a child. The voice is whimsical in what details keep getting added on for effect:
They were Netherworlders. Or Nethers. They had a strange bond with him. Sometimes for whole days he would just nurse their wounds. Occasionally, for a joke, he would shoot one in the butt as it fled. Who henceforth would limp for the rest of its days. Which could be as long as an additional nine million years.
Voice Shift
Then we change characters. The voice is unmistakably different. The sentences are more refined.
It’s wiser, older, melancholy. But there’s something off. Then we realize he can’t get to certain words. Sometimes they come out as a similar-sounding word that makes no sense in the context.
This man has something wrong with him. It’s obvious from the voice alone before we find out the truth.
The story is so good and suspenseful and moving once it gets going that I don’t want to spoil any of that by revealing what’s wrong or what happens. I want to keep focusing on the voice because I think that’s one of the best things we can learn from this story.
It was a miracle. That he’d got this far. Well, he’d always been strong. Once, he’d run a half-marathon with a broken foot. After his vasectomy he’d cleaned the garage, no problem.
He’d waited in the med-bed for Molly to go off to the pharmacy. That was the toughest part. Just calling out a normal goodbye.
His mind veered toward her now, and he jerked it back with a prayer: Let me pull this off. Lord, let me not fuck it up. Let me bring no dishonor. Leg me do it cling.
Let. Let me do it cling.
Clean.
Cleanly.
Narrative Style
I think this type of really close third-person is amazing in short fiction. It can get tiresome in a whole novel, but here it reveals so much in so little space. It’s entirely in the character’s voice.
The stream of consciousness takes us from what he’s doing to past times he’s done difficult things. This allows us to get a sense of the character in a natural way that would be hard to work in otherwise.
I’ve already explained the word thing, but it’s pretty amazing the first time it appears and you have to work out what’s going on. “Leg me do it cling.”
I read that and was super confused. I had to read it again thinking I’d missed something.
Then I continued as the character fights to find the right words. My confusion shifted to curiosity. What in the world was going on with him that he had trouble?
Closing Remarks
This collection of stories is a masterclass in how voice isn’t just another tool of characterization. It can be an integral part of the tension and action of the story if used properly.
I highly recommend checking out these stories and reading them with this in mind.
